This started off as a quick response to a question on LinkedIn Answers ... but I got on a roll ... Here's a simplistic way to measure and report on IT value: Is your IT group working on the right things? Are they working on the right things well? Is your IT spend comparable to industry norms? Is your IT spend comparable to other measures of company performance? A bit more detail ... balancing quantitative and qualitative ... (Quantitative) To…
I met Lora Cecere this evening, well-known AMR analyst for Supply Chain - a good conversation about the deeper potential for supply chain integration technology. The topic: are there bigger benefits here? Is it really only limited to optimization of your own supply chain? Don't get trapped into thinking that the business benefit of supply chain integration is limited to increased visibility - look at the different scenarios. A simplistic view of an integrated supply chain shows all the elements,…
I'm following a project management meme lately; while freely admitting that I'm oversimplifying some complex topics, I will forge ahead with ... project "value". At work, we've been talking about the classic challenge of putting a business value on a project. I call it a "classic" challenge because it's a basic requirement for every prioritization exercise that I've been exposed to. You know the drill - we have 10 projects, but only time and resources to do 5. How does…
Okay, the title is a bit of a false advertising. I'm not revealing the top five rules - I'm actually looking for help in defining rules #3-5. Any input is appreciated - care to weigh in with an opinion? I've had a number of discussions, with some of the best project managers I know, as we discuss ways to simplify methodologies and streamline our delivery process. Many organizations are trying to train their next generation of project managers, and all…
Okay - to be fair, that really wasn't the end of the chargebacks conversation. One of my cohorts suggested that we each come up with an argument counter to our position; I needed to come up with something "good" about chargebacks. Actually, it's quite easy to come up with the one good thing; the only problem is that it's something that most IT departments can't take advantage of ... Transparency Many business units, dissatisfied with the speed, efficiency, general business…
It felt anachronistic, getting into a surprisingly good conversation on the pros and cons of IT chargebacks this past week ... We're not seriously thinking about it (thank goodness), but a group of us did go through the intellectual exercise of discussing the good/bad/ugly of such an approach. Unfortunately, most of the "debate" focused on positive and negative experiences in the past. I think this is not an effective way to petition for such a change; it would be better…
My mother has always been an accomplished letter writer - her travelogues are definitely worth keeping. Lately, she's adapted her flair for the written word to email, having amassed a healthy mailing list of relatives, grandchildren, etc. Here's one she sent last month - I thought it was an interesting insight into the nature of learning. She's taking care of my aging grandmother, and writes ... ... when I was cleaning out mother's [room] ... I found a pile of…
Corporate Knowledge Management (KM) is hard. Hard to introduce, hard to teach/coach, hard to require, hard to create. Which, added all up together, often make it hard to use. It may sound like unfounded pessimism, as the Internet is loaded with examples of successful collaborative sites that aggregate and repackage knowledge - it's been doing that for years, ever since there were Compuserve forums and bulletin boards. Unfortunately (for the corporate environment), the Law of Large Numbers takes care of…
I've had many discussions over the past few weeks on this post, trying to define the difference between Blogs, Discussion Forums, Wikis, and other Web 2.0-style collaboration tools. In a particularly interesting tight loop this morning, I got into an IM conversation on the issue via my little Web 2.0 Meebo widget, tucked away in the corner of my blog. Over the course of the conversation, my colleague "introduced" himself with a reference to his blog - The Best of Enterprise…
As I've noted in the past, it really helps to understand the techies' way of thinking, especially when trying to get work done on tasks that are decidedly non-technical. Here's two more recent stories from work, both hinging on the common desire to just "git'er done". Why do we waste time removing obsolete code? Just hide the menu option ... A few months ago, we had a task to decommission a chunk of code that was calculating some elapsed time information…